Betrayal On Behalf Of Bitdefender
Greetings.
I have GWX Control Panel on constant watch in preventing to the download and installation of KB3035583 and its cronies, which have been regarded by many as tantamount to PUP/trojan horse/malware. This afternoon I was alerted by popup notification that Bitdefender intervened without MY permission, bypassed MY preferences set in GWX Control Panel and enabled Windows 10 Upgrades. Upon going back in to GWX Control Panel, I attempted to disable Windows 10 Upgrades to no avail. The result was also the same in Never10.
Regardless of how many times I clicked disable in GWX Control Panel, wuauserv kept restarting. I have now been forced to completely manually disable wuauserv in the Services control panel, so that it won't automatically start with Windows. This is only a small victory of part of a bigger battle; the protection of my privacy, my preferences and my consumer rights against the invasive and uncaring whim of the faceless corporate monolith that is Micro$haft. I never accepted their EULA for Windows 10 and never will, and I shouldn't be forced to by my choice of AV.
At the end of all this however, I feel as if my trust has been betrayed by Bitdefender, as it went out of its way to ignore my preferences and do unscrupulous things like this behind my back, all without my prior, express permission, and wouldn't let me exercise my choices and preferences afterwards unless I took extreme measures. I shouldn't have to take extreme measures. I should be being protected against snooping malicious software with prying eyes.
Kind regards.
Comments
Thanks for your post darkmessenger84.
I am writing this to join you in expressing my disgust at Bitdefender's decision to support Microsoft's blatant abuse of user's rights of decision, plus I discovered some more issues with it that I find unacceptable. I purchased Bitdefender about 3 days ago after a year on a free security suite that eventually failed on me (and the fact that I no longer get windows updates, due to Microsoft's obnoxious and arrogant insistance on all users installing big brother snoopfest windows 10, and decided to go with a paid subscription service again), and several "best internet security suites" comparison websites I discovered in my research put Bitdefender up there as one of the best. Obviously they were not aware, or chose to ignore, the fact that there are some serious issues, such as:
* As mentioned in the post above that I am replying to, Bitdefender changed, without my knowledge or approval, a setting in the GWX control panel to allow windows 10 upgrades, and then disabled the same app so I was not able to disable windows 10 upgrades any more with it. Thank God I had Windows update turned off, or I would have Windows 10 on my pc now and would have to go through the rigmarole of restoring the last image I made of my C drive.
* In addition to this, the booting times and results since installing Bitdefender had been seriously atrocious. I am not sure of the exact time, but it felt like booting my system took at least 10 times the time it used to take. I have an Alienware 14 running 64 bit windows 7 that utilises a 64 GB cache to speed up booting times that appears to be really incompatible with Bitdefender.
* I also use an old "Windows Vista style" sidebar because I dont like shortcuts all over my screen, and none of the componbents even loaded on boot. Another program that used to start on boot as a service, X-Mouse Button Control, now fails to run and I am unable to find its service component anywhere in the pc now.
* When these problems occurred, I decide to disable Bitdefender and see if it was the problem, but guess what - THERE IS NO WAY TO DO THAT. Nothing me off more than software that thinks it knows what I want better than I do. I will NEVER have software on my computer that I cant turn off if and when I want, especially if it hijacks apps on my computer (like the GWX Control Panel). Consequently I had no choice but to UN-install, and did so without thinking twice, and I am happy to report that straight after the reboot, after the UN-install, the GWX Control Panel is working perfectly once again.
This is the first program I have ever purchased (including ESET Security Suite that was a paid subscription that I used for many years before I went free for a year) and then UN-installed 2 days later, thus blowing the AU$77 I spent on it and I will take this on the chin as a learning experience - I really should have, despite the positive reviews, downloaded a trial first, instead of simply believing the reviews, and I would have saved myself AU$77.
I make this post to make other potential Bitdefender customers aware of these facts, and maybe the Bitdefender programmers think twice before treating, as Microsoft does, all customers like morons to be controlled and manipulated, suposedly, for their own good.